Publications reports: practical information

Context

The University of Liège's Administration Board decided, on the 23rd May 2007, to ask the various evaluation committees to only take into account, in all the evaluation processes at the University of Liège, publications deposited in ORBi, and only those deposited in accordance with the defined regulations (see the AB decision).

The official date for taking into account the references deposited in ORBi in all the ULiège evaluation procedures was fixed for the 1st October 2009.

Display models and formats

ULiège models

An important work of analysis, carried out with representatives of the Institution’s faculties, led to the constitution of official display models for lists of publications.

Model A (validated by Gembloux Agro-Bio Tech, the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, the Faculty of Medicine, the Faculty of Sciences and the Faculty of Applied Sciences)

Model B (validated by the HEC Management School-ULiège and the Institute for Human and Social Sciences)

F.R.S.-FNRS model

As for the F.R.S.-FNRS, contacts were established, during the setting up of the project to create an institutional repository, to put into place a process of exchange of the ORBi data between the F.R.S.-FNRS database, and vice versa.

For this model, the possibility of modifying parameters is limited and the only output format is .pdf.

Bibliographical display formats

Different bibliographical display formats for the references is offer.

The APA format (American Psychological Association) This Format is largely widespread on an international scale, and notably used in the field of psychology and connate disciplines. More information on this format:

The initial request can be modified with the blue edition button. New elements (another author, keywords, funder, etc.) can be added. You have also the possibility of using filters (for example, date of publication, availability of a full text version, document type, peer-reviewed or not, etc.).

Output formats for lists of publications

The following formats are available: PDF, PS, RTF (Word), TXT, HTML and XML.

Bibliométric indicators offered

Indicators linked to the journal

Impact Factor (IF)

The impact factor is a statistical indicator aimed at evaluating the reputation and visibility of a periodical. Created by Eugène Garfield and Irving H. Sher in the 1960s, it is published by Thomson ISI and distributed by the Journal Citation Reports (JCR).

The impact factor of a periodical for the year n n represents the ratio between the number of citations in year n of the journal’s articles published in the years n−1 and n−2 and the total number of articles published during these two years (see example). It thus measures the average frequency with which the whole of this journal’s articles are cited during a defined duration within the 7000 titles covered by the JCR.

IF5 or 5-year Impact Factor. Fields where the citation time of a reference is longer are disadvantaged by the traditional impact factor calculation. To respond to this flaw the ISI has offered a new indicator since 2009. The principle of this calculation is that of an impact factor for a period of five years and no longer of two (see example).

The reports indicate the IF of the year of publication and the IF of the last edition of JCR, "?" if if not known by ORBi yet and "-" if non-existent (the impact factor of the year of publication is made available every year in the month of May).

EigenFactor Score and Article Influence Score

These free of charge indicators are very recent. They were put in place by Professor Carl Bergstrom (University of Washington) to respond to criticisms of traditional evaluation tools and to provide alternative solutions.

The EigenFactor is constructed from the JCR data and takes up the principle of weighted page rank (adaptation of the algorithm used by Google) to evaluate the importance of periodicals.

The EigenFactor constitutes an improvement in comparison with the impact factor. It tries to take into account the differences between disciplines, eliminates self-citations, and does not take into account the direct citation but indeed the ensemble of the network in a large matrix. It is, in fact, calculated in a way to give the % of influence of a journal and generated in such a way that the sum of all the EigenFactors present in the JCR are equal to 100. In 2006, the journal Nature had the greatest EigenFactor, 1.992. The EigenFactor is also directly linked to the number of articles published in a journal.

The Article Influence Score corresponds to the EigenFactor divided by the number of articles published in this journal.

Indicators linked to the article

Total number of visualizations of a reference on ORBi (ORBi viewed). The data between parentheses represents the number of vizualisations internally within the University of Liège.

Number of downloads of the integral text via ORBi, including the requests copy (ORBi downloaded). The data between parentheses represents the number of downloads internally within the University of Liège.

To gain the detailed statistics for the reference on the basis of the report, it suffices to click on the reference’s handle number. These data are available uniquely to users identified on the ULiège network.

As a reminder, beyond the detailed statistics by reference, ORBi also offers general consultation and download statistics

Indicators linked to the author or to a group of publications

h-index or Hirsch index

This index attempts to measure both the scientific productivity and the apparent scientific impact of a scientist. According to Hirsh: "A scientist has index "h" if h of his/her papers have at least h citations each, and the other papers have no more than h citations each."

In ORBi, the "h" index is based on the number of Scopus citations of the references listed in the report.